Reflecting on Norman Lear’s death, Rob Reiner was understandably heartbroken on Wednesday. Not only because he loved Lear, whom he’d first met as an 8-year-old and considered a second father, but because Lear exited this world during a resurgence of many of the issues he tried to address through his television shows—namely, intolerance and bigotry.
“He just couldn’t believe that this was happening to America,” said Reiner in a phone interview, who had seen Lear several times in the past couple of months. “He would always say, ‘This is not the America that I grew up in and that we fought for to preserve. Something’s happened to this country that’s gone so far away from everything it stands for.’”
“We’d talk about this, and he would say, ‘It’s like Alice in Wonderland,’” said Reiner, 76, an Oscar-nominated director. Reiner won two Emmy Awards for playing the liberal son-in-law, Michael, to the close-minded racist Archie Bunker on Lear’s most famous sitcom, All in the Family, which ran from 1971 to 1979 on CBS.
The show aired in the era of appointment viewing, when there were only a handful of TV channels and households across the United States tuned in to the same programs at the same time. The shifting habits of American viewers, who can now easily silo themselves in echo chambers, have only contributed to the fracturing and divisions, Reiner said.
Of about 200 million Americans in the 1970s, “we were seen by 40-45 million people every single week,” he said. “There was no TiVo. There was no DVR. If you wanted to watch it, you had to watch it when it was on. That meant that you had a shared experience with 40 million people in America.”
No matter the issue that All in the Family dealt with on any given week—and it tackled thorny topics that would be considered contentious today: abortion, racism, gun rights—that issue would become water cooler talk the next morning. “You don’t have those kinds of communal experiences where you can talk to people,” Reiner said.
“The country either sided with Archie or sided with Mike, and that made for great discussions,” he continued. Lear “definitely tapped into something that nobody had ever done before or even since.”
Lear, who was 101 years old, drew inspiration from his favorite play: George Bernard Shaw’s Major Barbara. If you did not know that Shaw was a liberal, Reiner said, “you’d go to the play and you’d come away with equal pro-war/anti-war arguments on both sides, and it was made to spawn discussion.” And that’s what Lear wanted to do. “So he presented both sides. Archie had his side. And the character I played had my side, and we went at each other,” Reiner added.
That approach would likely never gain ground today, Reiner said. “He put a racist out there and showed the way racists really talk. And now, if you said things like that, you would get canceled.”
Lear would stir the pot. “He would ask us to look into ourselves and question our thoughts and feelings about these issues. And we poured that into the show. So it made the show better. And he did that with everything he did. Fearless.”
“This is the guy who flew 57 bombing missions over Nazi Germany during the Second World War. He faced fear in the sky,” Reiner said, adding that Lear was particularly disgusted by former President Donald Trump’s brand of politics. (“I don’t take the threat of authoritarianism lightly,” Lear wrote in The New York Times just last year.)
Reiner reflected on comparisons between Trump and Archie Bunker. Steve Bannon, Trump’s former adviser, once said, “Dude, he’s Archie Bunker.”
“I said, no, no, it’s not like Archie Bunker. Archie had conservative views and was certainly racist, but he had a decent heart,” Reiner said. “You could argue with him. You could fight with him. You can’t do that now, and that’s the difference between him and Trump.”
But it was Lear’s convictions and his desire to demystify tough topics that Reiner hopes will endure in the memories of Americans. “I’m going to miss him for a million reasons. He showed me the way, which is, you can take your fame and celebrity and do something positive with it. And I learned that from him.”
“He always had hope. That’s what’s so great about him. He was a realist, but he also had hope that we would find the right path, and I still hope that we can,” Reiner went on. “He was a man who really cared about this country and wanted it to succeed and be a more perfect union. We’re losing a real champion of America.”